Colony of New York, 1712

Beware the Africans. Koromantines and Pawpaws of the Akan-Asante, kidnapped from West African shores and brought to the oceans other side. Warriors, trained in the art of guerilla tactics as part of their rites of manhood, with anger and reason and nothing to lose. Fear them, Caucasians of the Colonies, for they are men born into humanity, raised to be the inheritors of society and not the beasts of it. They will lead and the rest of the slaves would follow, those other wretches whose belief in their own equality was a rumor oft denied. Beware, colonists, for now it is your dying time. It had been two years since the influx of the stolen members of their tribe had been transported to this cold, forest island. How long had they cached their stolen weapons in the woods north of the village for this moment? How many outrages against their humanity had they endured solely because they knew this time of retribution would come?

The rebel party was formed, ready to pour blood on the grass of Manhattan isle. Two were women—one joining her husband, the other pregnant. Two were “Spanish Negroes,” kidnapped off conquered Spanish vessels and enslaved on the basis that they were brown, and you could do brown people like that and there was good money in it. Tonight though, the brown ones would get to pay back the debt. They now moved as one, fully committed, their loyalty sworn by oath. Pledges insured by the literal collateral of their eternal souls.

You get pain, you get so much pain, that there comes a time that you have to give it back again. Succored by anticipated revenge, the chance to inflict blows those who so casual give them, they had waited and now there time had come—two hours past midnight, early one April morning in the year 1712. April in New York is a curious time. It gets so damn cold, the polar wind tunneling down the Hudson, that you start to look at the brown naked trees and start to believe that they’ve got no green in them. You give up on life, because by the end of March it’s a thing of faith. Then April and the little buds start popping and you don’t just remember life, you believe in it. April in New York is the time of nature’s revolution, where after six months of frigid death the first daffodils scouts the invasion of fauna. The Africans, they knew to listen to earth, not dominate it. Shake off your freeze and come alive. April also meant the promise of warm months stretching beyond. A body could make good tracks in the time before October’s winds shut things down once more. Walk far enough north, run fast enough, and there was free country up there. Free living.

Later, when it was time to point fingers, the Caucasians said it was the pubs, wasn’t it? Those black bastards, you get them drinking, they lose their bloody minds. And maybe the smell of alcohol was among them, spirits swallowed and spilled in tribute for the deed to go down. Maybe the Europeans just needed the rumors of drink to dismiss the event as drunken moment of rage, an anomaly for an otherwise docile breed of man. Peter the Doctor didn’t need a swill Geneva to find his gumption, no indeed. Peter was a free man, he’d tell you, the one free black among them, a man of knowledge, wise in the ways of the old land. Come before him, this man of wisdom. Let him shake the powder on your head that will protect you from the powder that fuels the colonists’ guns. Believe in this magic, for it is your belief that gives it strength, which can push you on. His scared hand reaching into his pouch with cautious solemnity, the Doctor drew forth a magic powder made by the rites of old and anointed all who gathered. Feel its power, feel your own, let the dust of the gods rain down. Become invulnerable...